A pharmacy may process and fill a large number of prescriptions from prescription orders. Automatic systems may be used by a high-volume pharmacy to process and fulfill prescriptions. Errors in filling a prescription, such as when the wrong medication is dispensed or when multiple medications are erroneously combined, are very difficult to detect. Human checking is very expensive and suffers from all the fragilities of human abilities. For example, a human's attention may be diverted, the human's attention may decrease over time, and the human eye may not be sensitive to certain discrepancies in dispensed medication.
However, training a computer to recognize dispensing errors with medication is very difficult. Recognizing the myriad ways in which medication can be dispensed and the innumerable angles at which individual medication items may be arranged in the dispensed product poses a significant challenge to computer algorithms. Further, computer algorithms may have difficulty differentiating between the dispensed medication and the package into which the medication was dispensed. For these reasons, many pharmacies do not use automated review of every dispensed medication, and, instead, rely on human spot checks of a small (often, random) subset of dispensed medications.
The background description provided here is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.